Shiny Plastic Sheaths
On the broken wooden table, a pile of fortune cookies was left in a mound on the right-hand corner. They’re mementos from a Monday night’s worth of takeout. R. never orders anything other than shrimp in lobster sauce–I’m a secret joint outside of the bathroom window and an order of cheesesteak egg rolls. Neither of us has room to eat cookies.
The cookies are left in their shiny plastic sheaths and I think about fortunes that won't come true. Still fully formed, eventually, they’ll be swept into the brown paper bag before getting tossed. How can we know the future if it’s never revealed?
***
On a Tuesday morning, which is the worst part of the worst day, I think about breaking open the cookies—still in their coverings from the day before. Force open their peachy exteriors. I’d hold the bodies and crack their shells until their fates were released into the air. Dust of prophecies snowing in the sky like a cloud, with the crinkle of plastic coverings crushed accidentally under my feet like snakes, cookies who exercise prayers for the future. But how long do fortunes last?
Sometimes, I fall in love so hard that I forget what the person’s face looks like. I’m enamored with shadow puppets and how folded hands can look so much like a wolf when set against the wall. Is there a cookie on this Tuesday table that explains why I fall for half-humans?
I leave to go to work instead of eating the cookies.
***
The subway to my job is a submarine and I look at the world gone watery outside of distorted windows. On my thumb is a papercut: a small nick like the time I sliced myself with a razor when I was a little little girl, surprised that razors take off skin. I hold these hurts inside my body to keep them close, shadows of memories. Pain is a tiny bite mark and the shocks of hurt have kept me company for so long I think of them as a friend.
***
When R. is upset he breaks apart and becomes locusts. Buzzing, vibrating, sending his body across the earnest valleys and destroying every fertile tract in his wake. There’s no hiding from his temper.
After we ate our takeout, my hand was a moth that bumped into the Diet Coke and it spilled across the table, sad rivulets rivering on the floor. R. became a pestilence. I listened to the drone of his anger as I mopped up the liquid, and thought about how nice it would be to wring some of the soda’s cool into my dry red-ringed eyes. His moods as a singular were pretty insignificant, but volumes are gained with trivial obstacles and it wakes the small beasts that make up the sum of his whole. He is waste laying to waste.
“You can’t even eat dinner right!”
I walked away from the yelling, hid in our embarrassing apartment while being embarrassed, and the cookies bore witness to the whole thing from their casings on the table.
***
When I was younger, I would call my favorite people “apple cakes,” and embrace them exuberantly, shaking my body against theirs like a dog after a bath. A puppy girl. My affection was the patterns dogs leave when they accidentally pee indoors: inside Rorschach raindrops.
There is an ocean of spilled soda between the sprung coil I was as a kid to the person I am now.
One Saturday two weeks before the spilled Diet Coke, R. and I finished cold cups of whiskey at a dive bar on
On the platform, there was an advertisement for a new Barbie, her face a billboard golden ratio and you could find eternity sifting through clouds of intergalactic pixelated dust in a rip on her cheek, Barbie’s cuts don’t bleed.
***
Sometimes I imagine that I can turn the wounds inside me into a supernova and keep them in my chest to then direct outward like a stream of fire. The cuts, all together--the blood coiled like a braid--would flow in a rage over other people. Pieces so small that bind together to become unceasing. But I’m only made up of myself and these pinpricks.
***
I watched the flower of the sun melt petal by petal out of eyesight on the subway ride home after a fortune-less day. The world goes underwater with every sunset. Inside the apartment is a shoreline of intertwined history, dirty clothes and plastic bottles and takeout napkins are the shells and claws of our indoor oceanic life. The fringe of land is composed of belongings moving away from one another in the erosion.
The cookies are still on the table and they are crabs and oysters--their skin hiding treasure, jewels of organs and vessels and valves and buried fortunes.
***
R. is a broken Heineken bottle that teens shattered during a bonfire, but instead of the ocean blunting his edges until sanded to round brushes he retains the scares of raw sharp glass that distributes little wounds. There is sand on shorelines, and then there is sand that makes glass that makes the bottles that get broken and slice skin.
***
Even though I can’t eat dinner right, I know I can hold the witness-bearing cookies in the heel of my hand if I wanted to and have them confirm everything they saw. I fear that the motion would turn the bodies of the cookies into sand. And the sand would become the dust that tops the waves of the ocean of our home; I know I couldn’t bear to look at the fates inside the silt.
At the end of a luckless Tuesday, with R.’s plagues coming back any moment, I sweep the cookies into a brown paper bag so I can avoid the locusts, instead.
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella is a writer living in
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